Michael asked:

Does psychology have anything else to teach us than common sense?

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I'm fairly certain that the thousands of people who work within the field of Psychology would answer
your question with a definite yes! Many regard Psychology as a science that is continually providing
humanity with newer and more accurate explanations of the human condition. And just as the natural
sciences, such as Physics, sometimes challenge our common sense ideas about the world, so too
does Psychology. What I will do here is list two examples of when Psychology, throughout its very
brief history, has challenged what we might describe as common sense.

Psychology can be defined as the scientific study of mind and behaviour. It is generally accepted that
it began life as a modern academic discipline in its own right in 1879 when Wilhelm Wundt created
the first psychological laboratory in Leipzig, Germany. Since that time, various "schools" have
dominated the subject, each with their own assumptions and methods for studying humans.

The Psychodynamic school, with Sigmund Freud as its seminal figure, attempted to understand
human behaviour by looking to the unconscious layer of the mind. By accessing that part of the mind
that remained closed to the individual, Freud and his followers believed that they could reveal the
"real" causes of human behaviour. Using techniques such as dream analysis and free association
(asking patients to speak the first words that come to mind), the psychodynamic psychologists
believed that they could access this hidden unconscious world of their patients and find the cause of
their problematic behaviour.

The followers of this school viewed their task as analogous to that of natural scientists. Just as the
physicist or chemist looks to the hidden world of the atom in order to explain the behaviour of matter,
so the psychologist digs deep beyond the world of appearance and consciousness to reveal the
reality lying hidden in the unconscious.

The explanations for various problems offered by this approach challenged the prevailing views at
that time. In 1909, Freud treated a boy called Hans. The boy was scared of horses, and was
particularly concerned that horses might bite his finger off. Far from explaining this in any common
sense way, Freud believed that Hans' problem lay in his unconscious desire to have sex with his
mother. His fear of horses was actually an external representation of the boy's unconscious fear and
jealousy of his father. His fear of having his finger bitten off was, according to Freud, a hidden
expression of his castration anxiety — his fear that the rival for his mother's affection, his father,
would cut his penis off! Hardly common sense.

Another school of Psychology that dominated the field for a large part of the 20th Century was the
Behaviourist approach. Its rejection of the "unscientific" assumptions of the Psychodynamic school
entailed a rejection of any concept that could not be measured in any accurate way. Because such a
vague concept as "the mind" could not be measured and quantified (put into numerical form), it was
excluded from any account of human behaviour. Radical Behaviourists made the bold step of
claiming that the mind did not play a causal role in determining human behaviour. The particular
features of an organism's environment were what determined the manner in which it behaved. Any
explanation of human behaviour which attributed any causal role to a thought or a feeling was
dismissed. To claim that a thought caused a specific behaviour was to invoke an "explanatory fiction".
Radical Behaviourism made its name by rejecting many ideas that were, at the time, regarded as
common sense.

To be fair, there are some theories and explanations in Psychology that do, at first glance, appear to
be little more than refined common sense. The same can be said, however, about some of the
findings in natural sciences like Physics. These cases perhaps say less about the limitations of
Psychology or Physics but instead more about how, sometimes, common sense can be very
insightful. The point I am making here is that good Psychology is not necessarily a refinement of
common sense. Good psychologists, like good natural scientists, are prepared, when necessary, to
challenge common sense ideas for the purpose of gaining accurate knowledge.

Simon Drew